All posts tagged ‘savings’

Like his mother and father before him, our son is a collector. He collects ordinary things like stones and shells. He also collects dice, bottlecaps, and more boxes, bags, baskets, and other containers than are strictly necessary to keep his various collections organized.

photo by Kay T. Holt

But the collection on which he expends by far the most effort is his coin collection. This kid loves money! American coins are nice and abundant, especially if you spend as much time as close to the ground as most young children do, so nary a day passes that he doesn’t find at least a bit of lost change to add to his college fund. Some coins are more interesting than others, though.

photo by Kay T. Holt

Even better than squashed pennies are the foreign coins in his hoard. Countries from all over the world are represented in his collection by their smallest units of currency. He has money from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia; everywhere his parents and grandparents have traveled, plus coins donated to his collection by distant friends and generous strangers. One day, he mentioned his love of foreign coins to someone having a yard sale, at which point that person fetched their own collection from another room and simply gave it to our son.

photo by Kay T. Holt

Some days I swear our apartment cannot possibly contain one more doodad, let alone another collection. In addition to our son’s assorted assortments, my husband and I have amassed more books, games, comics, trading cards, succulent houseplants, and inanimate frogs than may be sensible for one family to possess. And never mind that we’ve converted our dining area into a dedicated Lego playroom…

photo by Kay T. Holt

Still, I know we’re not alone in our passion for compiling sets of similar objects. After all, two of the earliest ways most babies blow their parents’ minds is by identifying patterns and sorting objects by their properties (often by whether or not a thing is palatable, to every parent’s consternation). In prehistoric times, this gathering behavior was necessary for the survival of our species, but now it’s just geeky fun. It could be said that we geeks have always been ahead of our time.